"Earlier this week Apple fired Scott Forstall, the architect of its iOS platform, and handed his duties over to the company's chief industrial designer, Jonathan Ive. Ive and Forstall had an infamously chilly working relationship, and one of their biggest disagreements was over the role of so-called 'skeuomorphic' design in Apple's products. Forstall, like his mentor Steve Jobs, favored it; Ive disliked it. To many observers, Forstall's forced exit looks like a vindication of Ive's stance. But if he wants to continue Apple's enviable trend of innovation, he'd be a fool to throw the baby of skeuomorphism out with Forstall's bathwater." Hoped for a thorough article on the benefits of skeuomorphism - got the age-old and intrinsically invalid excuse 'because it sells'. Windows isn't he best desktop operating system because it sells so well. Lady Gaga isn't the best artist because she sells a lot of records. This argument is never valid, has zero value, and adds nothing to what should be an interesting discussion.

So I wonder, maybe the trick to not get down-voted for exposing the ~errors of MS Windows competitors is to... overlook brainfarts of Amiga? ;P ( http://www.osnews.com/thread?540890 ) Or maybe throwing in that MS does half-baked copying of Apple...

WRT Apple & Jobs return: ehh, if only he didn't make the mistake of limiting Nextstep to niche, proprietary hardware - the world of ~computing could look very different now, MS possibly mostly making ~Office & not for their own OS.

Win 8 looks to be a Vista bomb, since they've spent 2 BILLION on ads and sold 4 million copies, that $500 spent for every $40 sale...I'd say Vista and 8 prove you're incorrect.

But come on, I think it's safe to assume we've only seen the beginning of Win8 sales; probably also that this ad budget is meant for some longer campaign.

The "Vista bomb" still shows similar numbers of web users as all OSX combined (so there are probably more Vista users, they should be on average less "web active"), and an order of magnitude more than all Linux combined; is the 3rd most used OS. Such "bomb" wouldn't be bad for MS ...and Win9 (and its Metro 2.x? ...just like Windows got good only at 3.x, and took the world by storm) might yet be loved, just like VistaSE "let's use the marketing trick of 'lucky 7'" is.

BTW SecureBoot and WinRT - I wonder of MS isn't setting things up so that OEMs could seel their devices below cost, subsidised by part of profit from appstore sales going to the maker of the device.
Of course, for that to work, people must be pretty much blocked from replacing OS on their(?) device...